Basketry Is Sustenance
By Jesse Dutton-Kenny
In October of 2020 Jesse Dutton-Kenny visited the Mills College Art Museum to research 39 baskets from Northern California Indigenous communities in the collection. This research project was sparked after Jesse saw a Pomo basket from the collection on display in the Slide Space 123 gallery in February of 2020. She began looking through the baskets in the MCAM online collection and found a few from Northern California that were almost certainly caps but had been misidentified as bowls. Jesse reached out to MCAM’s Exhibitions and Collections Manager Eli Thorne and offered to assist with improving the catalog records for the basketry from this region.
The way we view cultural materials in museum collections is greatly informed by our own cultural perspectives and biases. For many of us, when looking at this basket it’s hard not to see a bowl — it’s the right size and shape, the weave is watertight, so it’s probably a bowl right? A simple flip reveals the truth, that this is a ceremonial cap worn by Indigenous* peoples in Northern California. The basketry caps of the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk** are present in so many museum collections but are often confused for bowls due to their shape and lack of accurate historical documentation. Since 2015 I have visited different museum collections to study these caps, but it was my visit to the Hoopa Valley Tribal Museum, in particular, that transformed the way I thought about basketry itself, as not just beautiful artwork and material culture, but as a vessel for sustaining community life.
As a cultural tradition, weaving with plant fibers is one of the oldest forms of human manufacture. It has been practiced by Indigenous peoples of North America for millennia and continues to this day. These woven creations have been seen as everything from cultural heritage items to museum artifacts, commodities in trade to contemporary artworks. But I would argue that we can best understand basketry as an ongoing source of community sustenance. The idea of sustenance indicates something that supplies the necessaries of life, something that gives support, endurance, or strength to an individual or group. This is what I believe artistic traditions provide for Indigenous peoples more generally, but specifically in Northern California, basketry traditions have sustained communities in very significant ways through the drastic impacts of colonialism and into the present.
Basket weavers have always been extraordinary producers. They are also the managers of a family’s resources, and those responsible for the passing of art forms from one generation to the next. They quite literally provided the necessaries of life for the community and as such were themselves a central source of sustenance. Every season of the year groups of women went out gathering weaving materials and were responsible for land management, often burning patches of the forest to obtain better weaving materials the following years — a practice that continues today and is of ever-increasing importance. The time and care that goes into managing and interacting with the land to gather these materials and make a basket demonstrates their essential importance in forming community.
One of the baskets that immediately caught my attention in the MCAM collection was #1969.89, a Hupa acorn soup bowl from the early 1900s. Acorn soup was a staple in the California diet and this basket is an example of the very literal sustenance that basketry provided. To prepare acorn meal one could use a basket hat to measure the quantity of acorns; then, to cook it in a basket, one would add the meal and water, and then hot rocks to heat it — making sure to always stir with a wooden paddle to not burn the basket with the rocks.[1] The warm acorn soup would then be served in these smaller basketry bowls pictured above. This bowl is made from hazel shoots and conifer roots with a bear grass design overlay. I have rarely felt a basket so sturdy and strong — it felt almost like a ceramic bowl. The already watertight weave is enhanced by all the food residue creating a sealant in the cracks. Observing this, and the oily wear marks from hands on the exterior, led me to believe this basket was used many times as part of daily meals.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (roughly 1880–1920), there was a basketry collecting craze, part of the larger so-called curio trade, that swept through the country and California in particular. So many collectors during this period, including anthropologists, were buying baskets from Indigenous communities and trading posts. In the later 20th century, many of these collectors’ estates and possessions were then donated to museums, which is very likely what brought some of these baskets to MCAM. Often these were amateur collectors stopping at trading posts for souvenirs and not keeping detailed records of weaver’s names or dates. Others viewed these baskets through a salvage perspective as vestiges of a vanishing culture and were not overly concerned with recording extensive information.[2] As such museums today often face a huge information gap in their collections.
Collecting during that period has often been described as obsessive, having been given the moniker canastromania. The supply of older baskets was simply not enough to satisfy the market, so many weavers began adapting to the demands and weaving baskets specifically for sale. While basket making was originally a subsistence skill, during the nineteenth century it became a way to provide financial sustenance. Weavers found new ways to sustain their families as they adapted their artistic traditions to meet this need. Some began weaving smaller caps that would not fit a person because they could make them faster for more profit. Designs also became bolder and more homogenized to appeal to the market. Many museums today, including MCAM, have these very small, bold, ceremonial-looking basket caps for just this reason. When I saw #2005.133, #2005.131, and #2005.134, for example, their small size immediately suggested to me that they could be examples of this adaptation.
Recently, I attended a talk by author and Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer where, in discussing the impacts of colonialism, she offered this beautiful quote from another great Indigenous thinker and faithkeeper, Oren Lyons: “values change for survival.” We adapt to survive; this is how I think of the basketry that was “made for the trade.” The reasons people made baskets became less focused on supporting traditional practices and lifestyles and more focused on putting food on the table a different way, through selling artwork. It was another form of survival and resistance to being pushed off their lands. Although selling their basketry kept people in their homes and able to feed their families, there remains a pervasive narrative in some circles that the basketry of this time is not authentic, by a narrow definition of what that oft-problematic word means. Of course they are authentic, they are authentic to what was happening at that particular time.
Another basket exemplifying this adapted view of sustenance is #1948.31, a beautiful baby basket model from the early 1900s. Hupa baby baskets were done in an open weave twining style, with a handle at the top and, often, a second cap piece called a “breather” that went over the baby’s head. Here, I saw that this basket’s breather is attached with a braided strap that was intentionally woven into the basket so the breather could never be moved. A second strap, braided in the same style, forms a hanging loop on the back of the basket. These details, as well as its perfect condition and extra small size, tell us that this model was most likely made for sale. That weavers started making baskets like these for collectors does not mean they stopped making baskets for their own babies. As Cutcha Risling Baldy, a Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk scholar of Indigenous feminisms and decolonization has written:
As Hupa people navigated the changing landscape and relationships with the government, they found ways to set their own boundaries and negotiate this cultural shift. Pliny Earle Goddard notes how Hupa women continued to wear their basket caps “constantly” and carried their children in baby baskets.[3]
When new ways come it does not mean old ways have to go, they can and do coexist.
I often see museums harboring traces of a salvage ethnography mindset, that the older baskets with use marks and wear marks are more valuable, and commodity baskets represent a loss of tradition and are not as important in a museum collection. I would argue that both kinds of baskets simply hold different stories that museums can, and should, tell through their collections. If we want baskets to tell us something about peoples’ lives, then the acorn soup bowl is important, the cap worn in a ceremony is important — but the caps that were purposefully woven too small, or the baby basket that was made for a collector, those are also important. We can be just as amazed by what older baskets can tell us about precolonial life as we can be by what commodity baskets tell us about how colonialism shifted the relationship between weavers and their works.
Weaving as a practice continues today with a renewed significance to passing knowledge down between generations — yet another iteration of sustenance. Given that there are not as many weavers as there once were in communities like the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk, baskets in museums take on a particular importance as sources of instruction. Further, without enough baskets in the communities to satisfy current revival efforts of artistic practices and ceremony, the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk, among others, often turn to collections as resources for the future. We have now seen how basketry as a form of sustenance has shifted from being about providing for the needs of daily life, to an economic sustenance through sale and trade, to a sustenance in the form of shaping ongoing cultural identity today.
Museums hold so much knowledge in their collections. Their missions are to preserve, to protect, to educate. To meet that mission and share that knowledge, museums need to continuously seek information about their collections; research projects like this are a great starting point. The most important knowledge, however, will come from reconnecting weavers and Indigenous communities to their cultural materials. It was such an honor to visit with the baskets in the MCAM collection, and I cannot thank the staff enough for being so open to sharing and incorporating new information into their records. In our increasingly virtual world it is wonderful that these collections are available for the public online so that Indigenous community members, weavers, faculty, students, and others might find an entry point to come and learn from the collections. I’ll leave you with one final thought from Deborah Valoma, Chair of the Textiles Program at CCA, on what she learned from the famed Coast Miwok-Kashaya Pomo basket weaver Julia Parker: “the meaning of a basket lies not in its seen contours, but in its unseen connectivity.”[4]
*Many of the terms used in the past to refer to Indigenous communities have deep political, historical, and personal impact. Different communities use different terms varying from Native, Indigenous, Native American, American Indian, California Indian, Aboriginal, First Nations — to specific names for distinct nations and communities. Here I have used the term Indigenous when referring to peoples from multiple communities, and used specific names like Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk when referring to specific communities.
** The Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk are people of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers in Northwest California. Their traditional homelands, which they maintain to this day, are situated right next to each other with the Yurok being along the coast, the Hupa being in the Hoopa Valley of the rivers, and the Karuk being “upriver” to the Northwest.
[1] Fields, Virginia. The Hoover Collection of Karuk Baskets, The Clarke Memorial Museum. Portland: Graphic Arts Center, 1985.
[2] Pickering, Heidi J. “From Fishing Weirs to Fancy Baskets: How Changes in Native American Basketry Forms Reflect Changes in the Economic Independence of Native American Women During Colonization.” Master’s Thesis, Skidmore College, 2010.
[3] Baldy, Cutcha Risling. We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms & the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018.
[4] Valoma, Deborah. Scrape the Willow Until It Sings: The Words and Work of Basket Maker Julia Parker. Berkeley: Heyday, 2013.
About the Author
Jesse Dutton-Kenny is a museum professional living and working in Oakland, CA — the beautiful unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone peoples in the territory of xučyun (Huichin). An Oaklander through-and-through, Jesse holds a special affection for Mills College as she grew up playing on campus when her mother completed graduate school at Mills. She first started studying basketry collections in 2013 as an undergraduate in Ethnic Studies/Native American Studies at UC Berkeley. While in graduate school for Museum Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, she developed a project around basketry preservation using a model that looked at preserving equally the information, materials, and access to collections. She views this research with MCAM as part of ongoing knowledge sharing between museum professionals and communities that supports the care of these wonderful collections. You can read more about her work and contact her at www.jesseduttonkenny.com.
